Oh goodness! Where has the time gone??? Last night was Halloween, and for the FIRST TIME EVER hubby and I were home alone to carve the pumpkin and enjoy a delicious dinner before we had our 20 or so trick-or-treaters. We expected many more since Halloween fell on a Saturday, and the weather was good. But we live on a dark street, so that's that. It was surreal, not rushing around to school parades or assisting with costumes. Princess drove herself to JoAnne's and bought the supplies to make her mermaid costume and then came home and made it by herself! The parties were not at our house this year, but we did get to spend a little time with three of our four, French Girlfriend and some of their friends.

Hubby and I are approaching our empty nester phase, and I still can't quite wrap my mind around it. But now more than ever, I am feeling the burn of our generational differences. As parents, our roles are shifting as our children become adults. Behaviors are not nearly as clearly defined. Especially when it comes to one of my favorite muses- communication.

I am not adjusting well to the role reversal of my being the one to be seen and not heard. It was easier when it was the other way around- though it was never that way in the house I grew up in nor did we ever impose this on our kids. I just wanted to write it because I could :-)

It seems I am often putting my foot in my mouth by repeating things that should not be repeated. They also call me the owl for always asking "Who? Who?" I am the blabbermouth who cannot be told anything. Sometimes I don't even know that I am blabbing as I confuse it with lively discussion. Allow me to illustrate:

A few weeks ago we were enjoying the local fall festival which takes place at the church / elementary school our kids attended. Soccer Boy and French Girlfriend came to watch hubby work the Burger Booth, and they came into the Bingo room to visit me while I continued to lose every game. Soccer Boy shared a story about Buddha Boy's impressive activities at the party they both attended the evening before. Apparently, Buddha Boy was not faring so well in the Beer Pong match. Each time he missed a shot, he would drop to the ground and perform perfect push-ups- the amazing kind with the mid-air claps- as a punishment for failing to put the ball into the cup. Soccer Boy was impressed with the physical performance of his younger brother which is why he even mentioned this to me. I could easily envision the scenario.

After bombing at Bingo and binging on my burger, I went out to meet hubby who was talking with one of the teachers we have known for years. Buddha Boy joined us, and the teacher remarked on how much he had changed. Oh! It was the perfect time - I thought- to underscore how much he had changed by sharing the Beer Pong Push-up story! So I did. Without even realizing I was blabbing something not to be blabbed!

Later, while sitting at the table listening to the fake Beatles band blare, Buddha Boy chastised Soccer Boy for sharing the story with the blabbermouth. Princess chimed in reminding everyone that nothing is to be shared with me. Soccer Boy looked at me mystified and remarked that he could not believe that I had already repeated what he had shared with me. He acknowledged that he realized that I did not intend any offense, but stated that this was a perfect example of non-discretionary sharing. Buddha Boy suggested I write a blog about blabbing. So this is per his request.

The lesson I learned is that I am never ever to repeat anything about the activities of my children. Especially in their presence! Even if it is the rare situation where I am both proud and disappointed at the same time. Do they need to ask my permission to SnapChat photos of the meals I prepare? Of course not! I take it as flattery. I can't understand their reluctance to share their experiences in person when nearly every detail of their life is digitally documented and instantly distributed via SnapChat, Instagram, Twitter and Text.

FaceBook has pretty much been dumped by the Millennials once the Boomers took to it. It isn't cool anymore. Princess has me blocked from her Instagram as- in her own words- she did not want to risk being humiliated by the selfies I might post! Really! I am not a selfie poster. I don't get to see the many photos of her with her friends that I used to glimpse on Facebook. I blocked her from my Instagram as a mature response to her alienation. Buddha Boy won't allow me to follow his SnapChat. I am missing all that he shares of his Bearded Dragon consuming Luna Moths, the meals he consumes, and other details of his life. Soccer Boy and Computer Boy rarely post on Facebook. I don't think they have time for SnapChat and Instagram. If I want to know what is happening in their lives, I need to pick up the phone and text to arrange a phone call.

I hope we can all share Thanksgiving dinner together this year. It will depend on work schedules and obligations. I am going to push for it as I would like the opportunity to snap the annual photo for our Christmas cards. Yes, paper cards with a brief sentiment snail mailed with a postage stamp. How archaic, yet far more tangible than electronic messages for me. I don't share much family news on the cards anymore as there just is not enough room- besides, Facebook is where we share our news along with photos for those who are interested.

Goodness! I am having trouble wrapping this up. I don't have a strong conclusion. And it's getting late...... I'll continue to muddle through this awkward stage in my life and try not to offend. I don't always succeed.

Coat the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch casserole dish with olive oil and place the chicken on the bottom.

In a mixing bowl, combine the olives, mushroom soup, and spices. Pour over the chicken.

Place the croutons on top of the soup mixture and top with the cheeses.

If using cooked Turkey leftovers- cook for 25 minutes. If using raw chicken, bake for 40 minutes.

Greatest Generation

The Greatest Generation is a term for those Americans who fought in World War II, as well as those who kept the home front intact during it. Some of those who survived the war then went on to build and rebuild United States industries in the years following the war.

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Silent Generation

The Silent Generation was the generation born between the two World Wars, who were too young to join the service when World War II started. Many had fathers who served in World War I. It was coined in the November 5, 1951 cover story of Time to refer to the generation within the United States coming of age at the time. The article, (which defined the generation at the time as born from 1923 to 1933), found its characteristics as grave and fatalistic, conventional, possessing confused morals, expecting disappointment but desiring faith, and for women, desiring both a career and a family.

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Baby Boomers

The Baby Boomers were the generation born just after World War II, a time that included a 14-year increase in birthrate worldwide. Following World War II, several English-speaking countries -- the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand -- experienced an unusual spike in birth rates, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the baby boom. Baby Boomers in their teen and college years were characteristically part of the 1960s counterculture, but later became more conservative, eventually gave birth to Generations X and Y. Most academic and demographic literature uses 1946 and 1964 as the cutoff years of the Baby Boom generation

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Hippies

The Hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the early 1960s and spread around the world. These people created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis and LSD to explore alternative states of consciousness.

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Generation X

Generation X is the generation born between approximately 1964 to 1980, and connected to the pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s they grew up in. The term has been used in demography, the social sciences, and marketing, though it is most often used in popular culture. Other names used interchangeably with Generation X are 13th Generation and Baby Busters. Most of this generation are children of The Baby Boomers and The Silent Generation. Those born before 1973 spent most of their teen years in the 1980s.

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Gen X

"Baby Busters" is a term which is used interchangeably with "Generation X" and "13th Generation" to describe those people born between approximately 1965 and 1979. Others define it as the "post-peak Boomers", the long steady decline of Baby Boomer birth rates starting in 1958 and ending in 1968. Awareness of this generation began in the early 1990s, with cultural touchstones like the Lollapalooza Festival and grunge band Nirvana's song Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Time Magazine's 1990 cover story titled "Twentysomething", signaling the advent of a new generation coming of age.

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MTV Generation

The MTV Generation is a term sometimes used to refer to people born from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s. As a group, they constituted the youth culture of at the turn of the Millennium, ranging from age 15 to 25 in 2000. Culturally the term MTV Generation has been widely used to define the generation of young adults in the Western World who are influenced by fashion trends, music, and slang terms shown in music videos on the newly created cable channel MTV. MTV Generation has often been associated as a neologism for Generation X. The teens of the MTV Generation who grew up in the 1990s have also been referred to as the Doom Generation, picked up from Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation (1995) and due to the popularity of the 1993 computer game Doom.

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Boomerang Generation

Boomerang Generation is one of several terms applied to the current generation of young adults in Western culture, born approximately between 1975 and 1986. They are so named for the frequency with which they choose to cohabitate with their parents after a brief period of living alone - thus boomeranging back to their place of origin. This cohabitation can take many forms, ranging from situations that mirror the high dependency of pre-adulthood to highly independent, separate -household arrangements. The term can also be used to indicate only those members of this age-set that actually do return home, not the whole generation.

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Generation Y

Generation Y, sometimes referred to as "Millennials, "Echo Boomers", or jokingly as "Generation Why?", refers to the cohort of individuals born, roughly, between 1982 and 1994. These are usually the children of Baby Boomers and people in early Gen X. Generation Y grew up with many world-changing events including the rise of mass communication and the Internet. The Y Generation is known as a Culture War "battleground" with growing disagreements between conservative and progressive perspectives. 1976-2001 is the widest possible definition commonly cited, but generally speaking this generation starts with the 1980s and ends in the middle of the 1990s.

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Gen Z

Generation Z is the generation of people living in Western or First World cultures that follows Generation Y. Experts differ on when the earliest members of Generation Z were born, ranging from 1990 to 2001, though a majority opinion claims about 1996. Several other names have been used to refer to this population group, including "Generation V" (for virtual), "Generation C" (for community or content), "Generation Cox", "The New Silent Generation", the "Internet Generation", the "Homeland Generation", or even the "Google Generation".

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age - I missed it coming and going. ~J.B. Priestly

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It is one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us. ~Igor Stravinsky

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People who don't cherish their elderly have forgotten whence they came and whither they go. ~Ramsey Clark

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As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.
~Homer, Iliad

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Generation Gap: A chasm, amorphously situated in time and space, that separates those who have grown up absurd from those who will, with luck, grow up absurd. ~Bernard Rosenberg, Dictionary for the Disenchanged, 1972

We're the middle children of history.... no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. ~From the movie Fight Club, about Generation X

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The older generation thought nothing of getting up at five every morning - and the younger generation doesn't think much of it either. ~John J. Welsh

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That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another. ~Adlai Stevenson

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First we are children to our parents, then parents to our children, then parents to our parents, then children to our children. ~Milton Greenblatt

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A father lives after death in his son. ~Sanskrit

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When women feel they have learned to forgive their mothers - and men, their fathers - all it usually means is that they've decided to allow themselves the same kind of behavior. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

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Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers. ~Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades

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The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children. ~Clarence Darrow

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Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn't have anything to do with it. ~Haim Ginott

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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents' pots and pans, the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. ~Susan Sontag

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It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty. ~George Burns

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The healthiest among us is not exempt from hereditary disease. The most symmetrical, athletic, and long-lived is a being inexpressibly inferior to what he would have been had not the unnatural habits of his ancestors accumulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity.... Can a return to nature, then, instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking root in the silence of innumerable ages?  Indubitably not. ~William Andrus Alcott (17981859), Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages, 1838

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Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves. ~D.H. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 1922

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At present my chief work is on the manuscripts of the librarya blessed lot, as nothing could be more interesting, as bringing me into close touch with the ancients, to whom I now belong. ~James L. Whitney, "Reminiscences of an Old Librarian," November 1909 #oldsoul

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In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned. ~Jane Haddam

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My generation is not strong. My grandfather fought in World War II. I had a panic attack during the series finale of Breaking Bad. ~Matt Donaher

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Some men so dislike the dust kicked up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

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There is nothing wrong with today's teenager that twenty years won't cure. ~Author Unknown

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

A very self-important college freshman attending a recent football game, took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation.

"You grew up in a different world, actually an almost primitive one !", the student said, loud enough for many of those nearby to hear.

"The young people of today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon, our spaceships have visited Mars. We have nuclear energy, electric and hydrogen cars, computers with DSL, BPS, light-speed processing .... and..."

...pausing to take another drink of beer.... The Senior took advantage of the break in the student's litany and said, "You're right, son. We didn't have those things when we were young, so we invented them. Now, you - arrogant little - what are you doing for the next generation?"

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